Saturday, September 22, 2018
Friday, September 21, 2018
Sidney Lumet's Provocative "DOG DAY AFTERNOON" Backstory
The Romans sacrificed a brown dog at the beginning of the Dog Days
to appease the rage of Sirius, believing that the star was the cause of
the hot, sultry weather. In modern times, the term refers to those hot,
sleepy afternoons when dogs (and people) prefer to lay around and languish in the summer heat.
The bizarre true story that inspired ‘Dog Day Afternoon’
In August 1972, John Wojtowicz, 27, a married Brooklyn man and Vietnam vet with a stream of gay lovers on the side, decided to rob a bank to pay for his boyfriend’s sex change.
In the aftermath of the crime, a 14-hour hostage ordeal that riveted the nation, a character based on Wojtowicz would be played by Al Pacino in the 1975 film “Dog Day Afternoon,” which earned six Oscar nominations (winning Best Screenplay).
While Wojtowicz’s tale on film became the stuff of legend, the man himself remained little heard from until now, with a posthumous documentary, “The Dog,” hitting theaters on Friday.
The success of Pacino’s portrayal sprang from the hero/villain dichotomy of the character. As in the real-life robbery, which took place on Aug. 22, 1972, at a Chase Manhattan branch in Gravesend, Brooklyn, Wojtowicz got both his hostages and the many onlookers on his side, positioning himself as the little guy fighting against tyranny.
“The Dog,” which shows interviews with Wojtowicz from 2002 until his death four years later, proves his reality was more outlandish than any movie.
“The Dog,” which shows interviews with Wojtowicz from 2002 until his death four years later, proves his reality was more outlandish than any movie.
The night before the robbery, Wojtowicz and his accomplices — 18-year-old Sal Naturale and 20-year-old Bobby Westenberg — stayed in a New Jersey hotel. Wojtowicz had agreed to pay Westenberg $50,000 for his assistance. For that money, Wojtowicz wanted more than just a partner in crime.
“I grabbed ahold of Bobby Westenberg and I wanted to f - - k him, ’cause he used to dress up as a girl,” Wojtowicz says in the film.
“He goes . . . ‘I don’t want you f - - king me.’ I said, ‘I’m giving you $50,000, and you’re gonna tell me I’m not getting a f - - k out of it?’ . . . So then I f - - ked him.”
The self-described “pervert” met his wife, Carmen, at a bank where they both worked in the mid-1960s. Wojtowicz was drafted soon after and had his first homosexual experience during basic training. After Vietnam, Wojtowicz (still married to Carmen) joined the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), but was driven more by a desire for sex than politics.
“I was a member of the entertainment committee, so I would meet and greet new gay people coming into the scene,” Wojtowicz said. “I could have sex with them quicker than anybody else, because they were just coming out.”
“He was considered a disgrace at GAA [dances]. He would fall on a couch and start having sex with somebody in a semi-public place,” Randy Wicker, a journalist who helped Wojtowicz negotiate the film rights to his story, tells The Post. “His reputation within GAA was, ‘This guy is a looney-tune.’ ”
Wojtowicz eventually left Carmen. In 1971, he met Ernie Aron, a transgender woman who went by the name Liz Eden. The two married in a non-binding ceremony that December.
Eden’s pals were not impressed.
“He was skeevy,” Jeremiah Newton, a longtime friend of Eden’s who appears in the film, tells The Post. “He was obsessed with sex . . . I thought he was pretty stupid.”
Over the following year, Eden talked about a sex change operation, which Wojtowicz was against. But after Eden tried to kill herself, Wojtowicz decided that the surgery was needed to save her life and hatched the plan to rob a bank.
As depicted in “Dog Day Afternoon,” the crime turned into a 14-hour circus that had over 2,000 onlookers on the scene rooting for Wojtowicz, who, at one point, threw money out to the crowd. Westenberg bailed before the crime got under way, Naturale was killed by the FBI and Wojtowicz wound up serving five years in prison.
Once he sold the film rights to his story, the money was used for Aron’s operation. But after the surgery in 1973, Aron — now Liz — told Wojtowicz that she never wanted to see him again. Wojtowicz slit his wrists, but survived.
He found love in prison, “marrying” fellow con George Heath — both
got out in 1978 and moved in with Wojtowicz’s mother. Wojtowicz had the
nerve to apply for a guard position at Chase Manhattan Bank. Instead, he
found a job “cleaning toilet bowls on Park Avenue.” In the years to
come, he would spend time in front of the bank signing autographs and
wearing a T-shirt that read, “I Robbed This Bank.”
He died of cancer in 2006. While “Dog Day Afternoon” made him a legend, those who knew him say “The Dog” gives a truer picture of who Wojtowicz really was.
“They had no real understanding when they made [‘Dog Day Afternoon’] that John was as crazy as he was,” says Wicker. “He comes out more rational than he really was.”
https://nypost.com/2014/08/03/the-man-who-inspired-dog-day-afternoon/
The bizarre true story that inspired ‘Dog Day Afternoon’In August 1972, John Wojtowicz, 27, a married Brooklyn man and Vietnam vet with a stream of gay lovers on the side, decided to rob a bank to pay for his boyfriend’s sex change.
In the aftermath of the crime, a 14-hour hostage ordeal that riveted the nation, a character based on Wojtowicz would be played by Al Pacino in the 1975 film “Dog Day Afternoon,” which earned six Oscar nominations (winning Best Screenplay).
While Wojtowicz’s tale on film became the stuff of legend, the man himself remained little heard from until now, with a posthumous documentary, “The Dog,” hitting theaters on Friday.
The success of Pacino’s portrayal sprang from the hero/villain dichotomy of the character. As in the real-life robbery, which took place on Aug. 22, 1972, at a Chase Manhattan branch in Gravesend, Brooklyn, Wojtowicz got both his hostages and the many onlookers on his side, positioning himself as the little guy fighting against tyranny.
“The Dog,” which shows interviews with Wojtowicz from 2002 until his death four years later, proves his reality was more outlandish than any movie.
“The Dog,” which shows interviews with Wojtowicz from 2002 until his death four years later, proves his reality was more outlandish than any movie.
The night before the robbery, Wojtowicz and his accomplices — 18-year-old Sal Naturale and 20-year-old Bobby Westenberg — stayed in a New Jersey hotel. Wojtowicz had agreed to pay Westenberg $50,000 for his assistance. For that money, Wojtowicz wanted more than just a partner in crime.
“I grabbed ahold of Bobby Westenberg and I wanted to f - - k him, ’cause he used to dress up as a girl,” Wojtowicz says in the film.
“He goes . . . ‘I don’t want you f - - king me.’ I said, ‘I’m giving you $50,000, and you’re gonna tell me I’m not getting a f - - k out of it?’ . . . So then I f - - ked him.”
The self-described “pervert” met his wife, Carmen, at a bank where they both worked in the mid-1960s. Wojtowicz was drafted soon after and had his first homosexual experience during basic training. After Vietnam, Wojtowicz (still married to Carmen) joined the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), but was driven more by a desire for sex than politics.
“I was a member of the entertainment committee, so I would meet and greet new gay people coming into the scene,” Wojtowicz said. “I could have sex with them quicker than anybody else, because they were just coming out.”
“He was considered a disgrace at GAA [dances]. He would fall on a couch and start having sex with somebody in a semi-public place,” Randy Wicker, a journalist who helped Wojtowicz negotiate the film rights to his story, tells The Post. “His reputation within GAA was, ‘This guy is a looney-tune.’ ”
Wojtowicz eventually left Carmen. In 1971, he met Ernie Aron, a transgender woman who went by the name Liz Eden. The two married in a non-binding ceremony that December.
Eden’s pals were not impressed.
“He was skeevy,” Jeremiah Newton, a longtime friend of Eden’s who appears in the film, tells The Post. “He was obsessed with sex . . . I thought he was pretty stupid.”
Over the following year, Eden talked about a sex change operation, which Wojtowicz was against. But after Eden tried to kill herself, Wojtowicz decided that the surgery was needed to save her life and hatched the plan to rob a bank.
As depicted in “Dog Day Afternoon,” the crime turned into a 14-hour circus that had over 2,000 onlookers on the scene rooting for Wojtowicz, who, at one point, threw money out to the crowd. Westenberg bailed before the crime got under way, Naturale was killed by the FBI and Wojtowicz wound up serving five years in prison.
Once he sold the film rights to his story, the money was used for Aron’s operation. But after the surgery in 1973, Aron — now Liz — told Wojtowicz that she never wanted to see him again. Wojtowicz slit his wrists, but survived.
He died of cancer in 2006. While “Dog Day Afternoon” made him a legend, those who knew him say “The Dog” gives a truer picture of who Wojtowicz really was.
“They had no real understanding when they made [‘Dog Day Afternoon’] that John was as crazy as he was,” says Wicker. “He comes out more rational than he really was.”
https://nypost.com/2014/08/03/the-man-who-inspired-dog-day-afternoon/
Thursday, September 20, 2018
Thursday, September 13, 2018
The Power and Importance of "In Cold Blood"
By Roger Ebert
February 6, 1968
Link to review: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/in-cold-blood-1968
"In Cold Blood" is an eerie case. Not a movie. A case. The film itself, which is fantastically powerful despite its flaws, is the last episode in a chain which began eight years ago when the Herbert Clutter family was murdered near Holcomb, Kansas. Without that murder, Richard Brooks would have been hard-pressed to make this movie, and Truman Capote would have found little employment as the New Yorker's rural correspondent.
When I was typing up the cast credits, I came to the line "based on the book by Truman Capote." Some grim humor suggested that I could keep on typing: " . . . and the murders by Perry Smith and Dick Hickock." In an important sense, this movie was created by Smith and Hickock. They spent most of their lives compiling biographies that prepared them for their crime.
Perry came from a violent childhood. His mother drank, his father flew into explosive rages, he was beaten in orphanages. Dick came from marginal poverty, a rootless existence without values. So both were "victims of society,'' in the way defense attorneys use that term. For their own victims, they chose the Clutter family--a well-off, middle-class, God-fearing family that, in every respect, lived in an opposite world.
If this had been fiction, the themes could not have been more obvious. Two opposed cultures collide. The outsiders kill the insiders in the first round, then lose the second to the hangman. But the film is not based on fiction; the Clutter murders actually happened. If you look at the list of characters you will find names like Herb Clutter and Perry Smith. Real names. Also featured in the cast are Sadie Truitt and Myrtle Clare playing themselves. They were citizens of Holcomb on the night of the murders, and they still are today.
Considerations like that make it difficult to review, "In Cold Blood" as a movie. This is not a work of the imagination, but a masterpiece of copying. Richard Brooks and Truman Capote brought technical skill to their tasks in recreating the murders, but imagination was not needed. All the events had already happened. And every detail of the film, from the physical appearance of the actors to the use of actual locations like the Clutter farmhouse, was chosen to make the film a literal copy of those events.
I do not object to this. Men have always learned about themselves by studying the things their fellows do. If mass murders of this sort are possible in American society (and many have been), then perhaps it is useful to see a thoughtful film about one of them.
And to the degree that "In Cold Blood" is an accurate, sensitive record of actual events, it succeeds overpoweringly. The actors, Robert Blake (Smith) and Scott Wilson (Hickock), are so good they pass beyond performances and almost into life. Many other performances also have the flat, everyday, absolutely genuine ring of truth to them. At times one feels this is not a movie but a documentary that the events are taking place now.
What does bother me is the self-conscious "art" that Brooks allows into his film. It does not mix with the actual events. The music on the sound track, for example, is almost conventional Hollywood spook music, as if these murders had to be made convincing. The sounds of the landscape -- the wind and weather -- would have been music enough. Again some of the photography is staged and distracting. We see Herb Clutter shaving, and fade to one of the killers shaving. We see Perry's bus transform itself into a Santa Fe train passing through Holomb. Gimmicks like this belong in TV commercials.
Another of Brooks' mistakes, I think, was his decision to write a liberal reporter into the script. This figure obviously represents Capote. He hangs around during the last half of the film, tells about Death Row, narrates the hangings and provides instant morals about capital punishment. He is useless and distracting. Brooks should either have used Capote himself or no one.
What we are left with, however, is a film that this Hollywood artiness does not damage very much. The sheer evocative power of the actual events and places sweeps over the music and the trick photography and humbles them. The story itself emerges as bleak and tragic as the day the murders first occurred. The questions raised by Smith and Hickock's senseless crime and the deaths of their undeserving victims are still as impossible to answer.
• Link to the Original Story in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1965/09/25/in-cold-blood-the-last-to-see-them-alive
• Chapter by Chapter with Spark Notes: https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/incoldblood/
February 6, 1968
Link to review: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/in-cold-blood-1968
"In Cold Blood" is an eerie case. Not a movie. A case. The film itself, which is fantastically powerful despite its flaws, is the last episode in a chain which began eight years ago when the Herbert Clutter family was murdered near Holcomb, Kansas. Without that murder, Richard Brooks would have been hard-pressed to make this movie, and Truman Capote would have found little employment as the New Yorker's rural correspondent.
When I was typing up the cast credits, I came to the line "based on the book by Truman Capote." Some grim humor suggested that I could keep on typing: " . . . and the murders by Perry Smith and Dick Hickock." In an important sense, this movie was created by Smith and Hickock. They spent most of their lives compiling biographies that prepared them for their crime.
Perry came from a violent childhood. His mother drank, his father flew into explosive rages, he was beaten in orphanages. Dick came from marginal poverty, a rootless existence without values. So both were "victims of society,'' in the way defense attorneys use that term. For their own victims, they chose the Clutter family--a well-off, middle-class, God-fearing family that, in every respect, lived in an opposite world.
If this had been fiction, the themes could not have been more obvious. Two opposed cultures collide. The outsiders kill the insiders in the first round, then lose the second to the hangman. But the film is not based on fiction; the Clutter murders actually happened. If you look at the list of characters you will find names like Herb Clutter and Perry Smith. Real names. Also featured in the cast are Sadie Truitt and Myrtle Clare playing themselves. They were citizens of Holcomb on the night of the murders, and they still are today.
Considerations like that make it difficult to review, "In Cold Blood" as a movie. This is not a work of the imagination, but a masterpiece of copying. Richard Brooks and Truman Capote brought technical skill to their tasks in recreating the murders, but imagination was not needed. All the events had already happened. And every detail of the film, from the physical appearance of the actors to the use of actual locations like the Clutter farmhouse, was chosen to make the film a literal copy of those events.
I do not object to this. Men have always learned about themselves by studying the things their fellows do. If mass murders of this sort are possible in American society (and many have been), then perhaps it is useful to see a thoughtful film about one of them.
And to the degree that "In Cold Blood" is an accurate, sensitive record of actual events, it succeeds overpoweringly. The actors, Robert Blake (Smith) and Scott Wilson (Hickock), are so good they pass beyond performances and almost into life. Many other performances also have the flat, everyday, absolutely genuine ring of truth to them. At times one feels this is not a movie but a documentary that the events are taking place now.
What does bother me is the self-conscious "art" that Brooks allows into his film. It does not mix with the actual events. The music on the sound track, for example, is almost conventional Hollywood spook music, as if these murders had to be made convincing. The sounds of the landscape -- the wind and weather -- would have been music enough. Again some of the photography is staged and distracting. We see Herb Clutter shaving, and fade to one of the killers shaving. We see Perry's bus transform itself into a Santa Fe train passing through Holomb. Gimmicks like this belong in TV commercials.
Another of Brooks' mistakes, I think, was his decision to write a liberal reporter into the script. This figure obviously represents Capote. He hangs around during the last half of the film, tells about Death Row, narrates the hangings and provides instant morals about capital punishment. He is useless and distracting. Brooks should either have used Capote himself or no one.
What we are left with, however, is a film that this Hollywood artiness does not damage very much. The sheer evocative power of the actual events and places sweeps over the music and the trick photography and humbles them. The story itself emerges as bleak and tragic as the day the murders first occurred. The questions raised by Smith and Hickock's senseless crime and the deaths of their undeserving victims are still as impossible to answer.
• Link to the Original Story in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1965/09/25/in-cold-blood-the-last-to-see-them-alive
• Chapter by Chapter with Spark Notes: https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/incoldblood/
Saturday, September 8, 2018
Welcome to the Fall Introduction to Film Blog
This is the blog for the Fall 2018 Introduction to Film Classes at Roger Williams University, Bristol, RI, USA.
We will be updating this weekly with backgrounds stories on the film screened.
Our semester-long adventure begins...
We will be updating this weekly with backgrounds stories on the film screened.
Our semester-long adventure begins...
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